Will This Video Turn Jim Cramer Into A Toxic Asset?

We all know Cramer has a big mouth, but back in 2006 he gets dangerously close to admitting that he has engaged in “fomenting” the market, which he calls “blatantly illegal.”

First, most of the quote:

You can’t foment. That’s a violation. […]

You can’t create an impression yourself that a stock’s down, but you do it anyway because the SEC doesn’t understand it. […]

This is actually blatantly illegal, but when you have six days and your company may be in doubt because you are down, I think it is really important to foment if you’re one of these guys.

Now the video…

I like how he says at the very beginning that he’d never say anything like this on TV.

Well Jim…get ready.

But beyond Cramer’s boneheaded quasi-admission, here’s the one jewel in all of this that everybody should take away…

The great thing about the market is it has nothing to do with the actual stocks.

That’s right. It’s all about the manipulation, not the actual value. And guys like Cramer have made a living destroying people who naively believed that the stock market should work like it’s supposed to.

Now, people took note of this back in late 2006, early 2007 and Cramer responded by saying that he hadn’t broken any laws and that he created TheStreet.com to combat and highlight practices like these…

But others did not play fair, and that’s why I started TheStreet.com and have been writing about these abuses for nearly a decade — to explain to my readers how the markets really work. I wanted to give transparency to the market and tell people the good and the bad.

And so he got away with it back then, but do you see the logic gap there? On one hand he says he wants to “tell people the good and the bad” but in this video he says he would never say something like this on TV?

Obvious question: If he was so worried that this is standard operating procedure, wouldn’t he use any platform he could to tell people about it?

Long story short, it appears as if Cramer is a liar at best and a crook at worst.